Mix real and digital game worlds, play video games outside and create your own Hybrid Games!

Hybrid Play is a device for you and your children to experience and create new virtual adventures, and play them in playgrounds and parks. Play video games outside using the playground as a control interface. Hybrid Play promotes outdoor physical activity, verbal communication, and teamwork. Help us shape a new way to play!

Hybrid Play was designed for kids aged 6-12, and for parents who want to create with technology. It’s a fun, stimulating way to create and discover incredible video games, play outdoor, make exercise and communicate with other people.

We have created two game project instructables so far using the jolliFactory Bi-color LED Matrix Driver Module D.I.Y kits we designed. This LED Matrix module is designed to be chain-able so you may daisy-chain the modules together to the number of modules you need to suit your project.

I had think of making a game on Arduino quite a while. An idea strikes to my mind while I was playing a quite popular game which is available on apps and pc, 2048. 2048 is actually a game created by Gabriele Cirulli, aged 19, Itallian web developer. The objective of this game is to slide the tiles and combine them to create the tile of 2048. Source: Wiki

This game can be quite addictive and challenging which also makes me thought of how the game works. You can play the pc version at http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/. Then I took some time to figure out the basic of idea of the game operation, so that I can make one on Arduino. Isn’t it cool to create it on Arduino and create a different playing platform?

With scrap parts, I created a Connect Four® style game using an mbed microcontroller, a cellphone LCD, and a few buttons. The circuit itself is rather easy and the Nokia LCD library is readily available online. With the right parts and two hours you can get this running on a breadboard. With a little more time, you can solder it on a RadioShack perfboard. This is a fun project that a novice can attempt. It will give them a greater understanding of serial communication and how LCDs work.

My fascination with gaming devices stems from a game console (mbedGC) some friends and I created last year. The game console connected to a regular TV and this is using a cellphone LCD screen. The LCD used connects with serial and the advantage is when graphics are drawn on the screen they stay there until overwritten. It does not need to be refreshed like a TV does. The mbedGC has to use a framebuffer that stores the pixels it wants to display to the screen and constantly refreshes the TV. This wastes time and memory. The LCD acts like a framebuffer storing the pixels for you.

In the decade where videogames were born, everything virtual looked like rectangular blocks. From today’s perspective, the representation of a tennis court in the earliest videogames is hard to distinguish from a soccer or a basketball field.

‘PING! – Augmented Pixel’ is a seventies style videogame, that adds a layer of digital information and oldschool aesthetics to a video signal: A classic rectangular video game ball moves across a video image. Whenever the ball hits something dark, it bounces off. The game itself has no rules and no goal. Like GTA, it provides a free environment in which anything is possible. And like Sony’s Eyetoy, it uses a video camera as game controller.

Over the past few months, my friend Bertrand and I have been working on a game console, the PIX-6T4, which is powered by a Netduino mini.

The console is designed as platform for learning digital electronics and C#: we’re in the process of writing a book covering all aspects of building the console, how its components work and how to write games for it with our framework. Here’s a video of the prototype of the console…

Tinkerer and author John Graham-Cumming (he wrote the Geek Atlas) created an Arduino-based gaming system that fits in a can. [via]

On the left is the main controller (the power switch is visible) and on the right is the expansion controller with its cable. The left (red) controller also has a ‘fire’ button that isn’t visible and both have simple ‘paddle’ style controls.